authoring ePub ebooks

2008-12-14

As I mentioned, the Stanza eBook reader natively reads the ePub format. So I was wündering how hard it could to author this format? If you start googling this topic you get two very (seemingly) convlicting impressions:

ePub is a fully open and free eBook format/standard

you need a killer professional application to author it (Adobe InDesign CS3 or 4)

Being the DIY mind that I am I was intrigued at how hard it could be to create your own ePub files. It turns out it's actually fairly easy. If you can author HTML/XHTML, you should be able to author ePub files. Here are two important articles/tutorials you should read if you want to get into this:

It turns out that in it's core a ePub publication is quite similar to a set of HTML pages. It's a set of XHTML 1.1 formatted content files (with CSS styling and maybe some images) and some extra organisational files (a TOC and some others), all packages up as a ZIP archive. Going through the tutorial linked above yu should be up and creating your eBook in no time.

Don't let the discussion and existing open source project'S complexity fool you: these people are mainly concerend with far larger asoects of eBooks - organisation, distribution, etc. If what you want to do it publish your writing as a eBook reader ready files, there's not much you need to do. And if you are hapy using online services to author and publish your books, please to try Feedbooks,